Applied Animation: Evaluation

For the module-applied animation I produced two animations, which were for E4 and BBC 4 channels as idents. Throughout this module I feel like I’ve pushed myself into new software and gained new skills, that I’ve also used to help my peers throughout their animation. I’ve also found this module really interesting because we were taught about Maya the 3D software, which is what I would like to investigate further into in the future as 3D animation is what I aspire to be good at. I was also introduced into model making with plasticine and foam, which to me was very beneficial but not my favourite because my ability to mould and model a character with my hands is not good, so if I used my armature for a stop motion animation it won’t be the best, where as if I use a premade armature the stop motion animation will look reasonably okay.

The E4 ident animation I feel went as according to plan but I didn’t want to spend as mush as I did because I spent £65, which is a lot for a student. In my animation I like how the lighting in the animation looks because it really gives it that Indiana Jones running through a forest feel. I also like my sounds that I’ve used in my animation because it makes the whole animation become comical which is what I was going for. Although what I don’t like about my animation is that the speed Indiana Jones moves, it is faster than I wanted and it makes it a bit harder to follow. If I could change anything about my animation I would change the speed by refilming the whole animation and I would make sure the camera wouldn’t shake as well.

My BBC 4 animation I feel went better because the look of the animation is smoother and apparently to my peers it looks more professional. I create my animation using Maya which I feel I’m really getting the use to it and I’m learning a lot because I’ve been using it in the past module to create 3D models. The hard part was putting moving images into the moving boxes but I finally understood how to do this thanks to my tutor showing me how this could be done. However, what I don’t like about it is the background because it’s too bland and there’s not much there. That’s the thing I’d like to change if I had to redo the animation again, and I’d probably change the camera angles at some parts because there a bit off or the objects aren’t central.

Throughout the module we also got taught more about Maya and what we could produce animation and how we can do this. I feel that I picked up Maya quicker than most of my peers but that could just be because I’ve been using it longer than others, but this was a good thing because I could help other people with Maya because they didn’t understand it as well as I did. Overall the whole experience in the module was good and I learnt a lot from it, but it was also hard working and stressful at some points, which I over came it in the end.    

BBC 4 Research

Again looking at some BBC 4 ident animations really helped because it got me to see BBC 4's style and how they do there idents. Most of the idents I've watched seemed similar in there style by just using four pieces of footage and putting them together and then messing around with some effects. Some of the other idents I've watched were 3D animations which is what I wanted to do for my ident animation.

These Idents were cool to look at and I've got an idea of how I could of done something like this because I did something like this last year, however I wanted to do something with more animation in there and that would teach me more skills throughout the process of creating the animation.

I also found this animation that BBC 4 had done for there anniversary, which was a 3D animation so I like the style of this animation because I really want to go into 3D animation. I want to try and do something like this but simpler by have footage of the programs on BBC 4 in boxes and have the camera pan through them.

E4 Ident Research

Looking at some animations really helped me figure out how I wanted my animation to look and feel, and what it was going to be about. I know I wanted to do a stop motion animation for my E4 animation so I looked at some animation that was on the E4 website and I also looked at some stop animations on youtube.

This animation I looked at was about Superman fighting Batman but realistically. It was done by using lego and added effects here and there, but the best thing about this is how smooth the animation feels and looks which is want I want my animation to look like.

This stop motion animation was for the E4 ident but in my opinion I've seen better but I like the idea behind this piece. I also like how they incorporate the E4 logo in with the lego which is something which I want to do.

I'm wanting to animate with lego because it looks cool and I think it will be easy to animate with because I won't have to build characters, but I will have to build an environment for my animation instead.

Improvement on My Final E4 Animation

After looking back at my animation and after people have given my feedback on it I've realised that it needed a few changes. So the thing that I changed about it was the ending because when Indiana Jones is on the floor and the E4 logo is next to him the framing of the logo was wrong, it was too close to the bottom of the screen. To change this I added in a digital E4 logo on After Effects so that is in the middle of the screen, and I've also added in a sound effect to go with the logo, which is a punching sound because I wanted the the E4 logo looking like its been hit on screen.

However, I did talk about changing the Indiana Jones theme music previously but unfortunately I could not find any music that sounded similar to an Indiana Jones theme. So I just left the music in because I've already talked about copyright problems.  

Copyright Problem

Up until now I didn't realise that the music in my stop motion animation would get banned if I uploaded on the internet, just because I used the Indiana Jones theme tune throughout my animation. This would get banned because of the copyright law and how I didn't get permission from the song writer/producer to use his song in my animation.

I know that if I use another persons song/music in my animation I will need the permission and if I use a cover of a song I'll need permission from the person who did the cover and again the song writer/producer. If I do use the audio I will have to put in a disclaimer in the video to say that the song I've used isn't my own.

However, I do feel like I might try and find a different song that sounds similar to the Indiana Jones theme tune, just so that I've got less of a chance having a copyright problem.

Applied Animation: Final Crit

The final crit is where I showed my peers and my tutor my animations for applied animation, which went well in my opinion because they all laughed at my E4 animation and they thought my 3D animation for the BBC 4 was cool. However, there were a few suggestions that people said that I could change about my animation, the suggestions said were; in my stop motion animation at the end the E4 logo is a bit low down on the screen, and that maybe I could digitally stamp the E4 logo in the middle of the screen.

Also in the BBC 4 animation people said that again near the end I could move the cubes further back away from the screen so you can focus on all the boxes properly, and they said that the camera could be smoother when panning through the boxes but I feel that I won't have enough time to fix the camera moving around.

Throughout the rest of the week I think I might go back to the animations and mess around with them until I feel happy with the out come. I'm also going to figure out if I can change the Indiana Jones theme music in my stop animation because of copyright reasons.
  

BBC 4 Ident Animtion

This is the final BBC 4 ident animation, which show a range of television programs to watch on the channel. I produced this using Maya and After Effects because they're the two softwares I;m most comfortable with and I've done a stop motion animation for E4 as well. The one thing I like with this animation is that I've managed to put the TV programs into the boxes, because I thought that this would be so mush complicated that expected. Another thing I like is the was they all come together at the end, I did this so you can see all the TV programs clearly on the boxes.

The one thing that I'm not too pleased with is that the camera moves a little bit too fast when it goes through the boxes because you can't get a good look at most of the TV programs. The one thing I would change would be the background because I feel if I put a bit more effort into the background as I did with the boxes it would look a lot better.  

Putting Sound To The BBC 4 Ident Animation

The next thing that I had to do was add music which was hard because I wanted a calm and soft melody to put behind the footage, but I couldn't find one that would fit with the animation. In the end I found previous BBC 4 music and placed that into my animation because it seems that they use nearly most of the BBC 4 idents with the same music. 

To do this I used youtube converter to get the music of off youtube and place it into my animation. After that I just messed about with the music so that it would fit with my animation and then added some easing in and easing out to the music at the beginning and end. Also I added a light and a camera to the composition which adds a depth of field, as well as making the composition look more 3D in my opinion.

    

Putting finishing touches on BBC 4 Ident

Now that I had the images moving in the boxes I then put the image sequence I batch rendered from Maya into After Effects, when that was done the video that was created in After Effects had a black background which in my opinion was a bit boring so what I decided to do was add an effect to the background to make it more pleasing to look at. The effect I used was called gradient ramp which created an effect that uses a radial gradient from whit to black, which gives the background a cool looking effect

   Seeing this now I'm thinking that it needs a shadow underneath the boxes because they just look like they're floating in mid air. So what I did was I went back into Maya and batch rendered the shadows of the boxes, then put the image sequence into after effects and put it in the same composition and I placed the shadows above the boxes layer and put the multiple effects on the shadow layer.

E4 Ident Stop Motion Animation

When I finished editing the stop animation I got some of my peers to take a look at it for my to see if it was comedic and if the sound effects came in at the right time. All of my peers said the the stop animation was comedic and well edited, but one of my peers pointed out to me that the Wilhelm scream came in a bit too early. So I went back to the footage and just edited it a bit more so that the sound would match the stop animation, then hopefully I'd be finished with it.

Overall I'm quite pleased with the final out come of my stop motion animation and I like how I've used many different angle shots with the camera, also I like movements when Indiana Jones is faced with the obstacles in his way. However, what I'd like to of done was re-film the whole thing but in one camera shot just to see if it would of looked better, but I didn't feel like I had enough time to do this. One thing I would change in the stop animation would be the rolling rock that appears at the end because I wanted everything to be make from lego and I feel it would of looked a lot better and professional.   

P.S the footage above I had to export it was a video thats make for web because the original footage couldn't fit because it was about 200 mb and blogger only allows films up to 100 mb.

E4 Ident Stop Motion Animation: More Editing

Now knowing what I need to do to fix the last problems I could now apply them to the footage. All I needed to do was add an effect in After Effects called Stabilise camera, this would stop the shakiness of the camera but I couldn't used a lot of the effect because it would cut off some of the footage when stabilising. the other problem was that the movements in the stop animation was a bit to fast for my liking, so what I did was I went on the footage time line in After Effects and right clicked and went to stretch timeline, what this did was slow the footage down but it also made the footage longer which I didn't want. Realising this I went through my footage finding bits that I could cut out of if to make room because the footage could only be ten seconds long, I did manage to do this and now the footage is looking good.

Next was to add the sound, now knowing E4 most of there idents are comical so what I wanted to do was add comical sound effects to the stop animation. Seen as though the character I used want Indiana Jones I imported the Indiana Jones theme music into the composition, but then I wanted to add in the Inception sound effect, which will notify the big rolling rock coming towards Indiana hen he picks up the E4 logo. I also wanted to add the famous Wilhelm scream for comedic effect, plus its for when Indiana Jones is running away from the rock.

       

Lego Stop Motion: Filming and Editing

When I was filming the stop motion animation I was in my college in a dark room because I wanted to get a dark atmosphere, I did this so that I could illuminate different parts of the lego set and the E4 logo. I was also in that room because I was very quiet in there and no one would distract me from my work, plus I wanted to get the filming done in one day so that I wouldn't have to do redo any of the animation on a later day.

The actual filming of the stop animation was a bit hard because the lego set was a bit fidgety and the trees kept falling down when I brushed passed them with my hands whilst I was moving the Indiana Jones figure. Also whist coming to the end of the stop motion animation I forgot about the big rolling all that was suppose to appear, but the ball was going to made from lego but seen as though I forgot I just used some random materials that was in the room. The materials I used was some gaffa tape rolled up in a ball, then I just put some plasticine round the rolled up gaffa tape to look like a big rock.        

After looking back at the stop motion animation I produced I feel like the camera was a bit shaky and some of the movements were a bit faster than what I wanted it to be. However if I mess about with the film in after effects I think that I can solve some of the problems with it. 

E4 Ident Stop Motion: Set Design P.2 Even More Lego!

After going back to the lego store and paying another £35 I finally finished setting up my scene for Indiana Jones to run through the jungle.

 As you can see the board isn't completely full of lego because I ran out of it again so I'm just leaving it like this. This won't matter too much because I'm wanting to to get close up shots with the camera of Indiana going through some obstacles.








In my opinion I would of liked to have bigger walls to look like Indianas going into a cave or something like that, but if I did that I'd have to spend even more money which I don't want to do.  

E4 Ident Stop Animation: Set Design

My idea for the set design was a jungle type feel, where Indiana Jones would run through to get to the E4 logo. I wanted to make the whole set from lego so I tried looking online for indiana Jones lego sets but they're either too expensive or none existent, so what I had to do was go the the lego store iN Leeds and fill up a couple of buckets full of green and drown lego blocks and I also put in some trees and pieces of grass. The Buckets cost ma quite a bit of money which was £35, so I hoped that the amount of lego I got was going to be enough.

When I got back to my flat I realised that when I started putting together my lego set I didn't have enough pieces, which really annoyed me because it looks like I needed to go back and buy a lot more next time I go to the lego store.
 

Applied Animation: The Model P.4

 In this lesson we had to use a mixture of wax and turps to spread on the paster mould so that when we had to pour the foam mixture in it the foam wouldn't stick to the plaster. We then had to get a very tight rubber bang like the inner tube of a bike tier, and put both plaster moulds together and tie the band round the moulds so that they stay in place without moving.

Then came the adding of the foam, this was done by adding two different agents together very fast because they set quickly into the mould. Before we could add the mixture together we had to work out the correct ratio (which was 70:40 for my mould). After that we had to weigh the mixtures so that we could work out if we had the right amount, then we mixed them together very quickly so that there were no bubbles in the mixture, this is so that when the mould is set the character doesn't have any holes in it. When we poured in the mixture into the plaster moulds we had to move the plaster moulds around so that the foam mixture would get into every space possible, however if you put too much in it would over flow and come out at the feet, this is okay though because you can just cut off the bit you don't want.

The most difficult part of this process it the actual taking apart of the two moulds because the foam is so sticky that it can damage the plaster, which is what happened to me when I was pulling off the plaster. I think it was because I didn't put enough of the wax and turps mixture on the plaster mould before adding the foam to it. Not doing this made me completely break my mould into two pieces, which was depressing but my foam model came out okay I suppose.

Applied Animation: The Model P.3

In the third lesson of the 3D model making we were told that we would be making moulds of our armature so that we could make a foam models as well. How we did this was actually quite simple because all we had to do was place a layer of clay under neath the plasticine model and cut around the model and then take out the clay outline and place the plasticine model inside the clay. After that we then got more clay to make walls round the model  which would create a box round it, we did this because we were going to pour plaster into the box to make one side of the mould.

  we had to do this very carefully because the plaster could break the clay and go everywhere (this did actually happen to someone because they didn't build a thin enough wall round the armature). After the plaster dried we took the clay of and carefully removed the armature from the hard plaster, when you took the armature out it left a nice mould of the character in the plaster but it was only one half of the armature so we had the redo the procedure again but face the plasticine model the other way so that we could get the other half of the mould.  

Applied Animation: The Model P.2

In the next model lesson that we had we had to put padding in the middle section of out model to make it look like it had a belly, also it was to reduce the amount weight of the model so that when we add the plasticine it doesn't fall over.

Next was adding the plasticine to the model which was to me the hardest, but coolest part of the model making because you can start to see your 2D design turn into a 3D model and you could actually play about with it. The actual making and shaping the model with plasticine took so long because you'd get the plasticine in the right place but then you'd have to smooth it out, but once you've smoothed it, it was in the wrong position again, which was very annoying!

Once I'd created the shape of the character I then had to add the clothes and some additional features like the face and a necklaces, however the face took the most effort because my character had a bear hoody which put even more weight on his head. Overall I am quite pleased with the out come of me model, but I would like to of added different coloured plasticine but we wen't allowed to because that would us up too much materials.

   

Applied Animation: The Model P.1

For part of applied animation we were given an opportunity to attend a couple of workshops showing us how to make our own 3D models. What we had to do was on the first lesson we had to bring in a character design that we created, then we had to draw it out again but this time have their arms spread out to the sides so that we could get the proportions right. We did this because we had to make a 9inch wire armature that would act as a skeleton of our model.

 To make the armature strong we had to twist the wire using a drill, after that we had to add connecters to the wire in places where the shoulders and hips would be. After that we then added a material called Millie Put on the armature to help with stability and to show were the muscles would be. I found the lesson to be interesting because I like making 3D objets, plus its a change from looking at a computer all day.  

Putting Moving Images On The 3D Boxes

Putting moving images on the boxes in my animation was quite the task to do. This was because I had to get the net for the boxes and put them into after effects, then I had to get the videos, from which I downloaded from youtube of the shows, and put the video into the boxes net. After I rendered that out I went back into maya and placed the net I'd just rendered in after effects onto the box as an image sequence. I did this five times for each box, so it did take me a long time to finish putting textures on to the boxes. 

I feel like this looks so much better that the previous ones I've done because the moving images in the boxes make it a lot more entertaining to watch. I still need to put a background to the animation and i need to sort out the camera angle at the end because the big BBC 4 logo is too near the top of the screen. 

Animating in Maya: Anticipation

For the Anticipation part in animating in maya we had to create something with anticipation, so what I did was I animated a ball starting to bounce. The ball starts on the floor, then squishes down to build momentum to jump up in the are.

I feel like the ball squishes too much when the ball is in the air but other than that I do like the anticipation animation I produced.

Animating in Maya: TurnTable

For another animation we did in maya was a turn table, this is where you get an object and do a 360 turn round the object. I did this by setting one keyframe at 0 at the beginning of the time line and another keyframe at 360 on the end of the time line. Another way of making a turntable and this was is were you go the animation menu and click on Turntable and it will do it for you.

I really like the look of this turntable because I created the E4 logo for my animation I was going to do for applied animation but I decided to do a stop motion animation instead, so its nice to use it in another animation.

Animating in Maya: Bouncing balls

In our induction to maya we also animated two bouncing balls, one which was a solid ball and the other which was a soft ball. This was to get us to use one of the 12 principles on animation which was Squash and Stretch. The concept of the animation was simple to follow, but the actual animating was very difficult to figure out, because you have to think about the easing out/in of the balls and the timing of the when the balls hit the ground and when the ball squashes.  

It was hard to animated but I'm pleased with the outcome of how the ball bounce looked. The one thing I would change about the animation would be slowing down the speed of how fast they fall and bounce.

Animating in Maya: Overlapping Action

After we did the pendulum animation we then went on to doing the segmented pendulum. I did this by making the movements the same as the pendulum before, by selecting the components and adjusting the position of the object and then setting keyframes on the timeline. However, the segmented pendulum was looking too uniform and not realistic because it had no overlapping action on the balls lower down on the swing.

To create an overlapping action I had to open up the graph editor for the movements of the segmented pendulum, and shift the motion paths along one by one. This meant that they moved at the same speed but the balls nearer the bottom would swing later that the ones at the top of the swing.

I liked the look of my segmented pendulum swing and how smooth it was, but there is a bit of a pause when I start to loop the video. The reason for this is that I just need to go back and look at the graph editor and tweak some of the movements within the swing.    

Animating in Maya: Pendulum

The other week we started animating in maya, and for me this was really exciting because I've really wanted to learn how to do 3D animation. Most people found it very frustrating getting use to it but I found it alright however at some points Matt (out tutor) was going a bit too fast. The work surface of maya is quite similar to other softwares I've used in the past so I found it easy to get use to it.

What we did to start with was a simple pendulum, just to get use familiar with the software and I found it to be simple enough to use and I'm pleased with my pendulum I've created. Hopefully after a while I'll be comfortable enough to use maya on my own and produce things on there which look difficult but good.